PARTISAN REVIEW
557
to criticism by any authority, for there are no communists more powerful than
themselves. Absolute ideological correctness is fused with absolute power in a
system which has all the claims of being absolutely objective in its attitudes and
absolutely scientific in carrying out its policy. Power, even more than the
ideology, gives the communist state this authority. Power ultimately becomes
ideology and authority. Since communism is embodied in the leaders, whoever
criticIzes them is defining himself as to that extent anti-communist, and of
course, the extent to which he is critical is only the tip of the iceberg of his
profound anti-communism, perhaps unknown even to himself. Some perhaps
slight criticism he makes openly or thinks secretly to himself is a surface
symptom of a deeper, perhaps all-possessing hostility, just as a nervous tic is a
symptom of some deep neurosis.
To complete the picture of absolute ideological correctness and absolute
power one must add that of absolute interest. In a world divided into hun–
dreds of different kinds of interest, or self-interest, the Russian communist
leaders theoretically represented the absolute interest of the working class
vested in them.
As someone outside Russia who lived through much of the period de–
scribed by Solzhenitsyn, the only crumb of testimony I can add to his is confir–
mation of the seeming infallibility of Stalin
to
communist sympathizers. This
was the inevitable result of his being the all-powerful leader of the only
country in the world in which communism was in power. Since he was in this
unique position, to criticize his pronouncements was not just to criticize his
Communism by the standards of some other communism, it was to take the
side of the bourgeoisie against the one communist leader of the one com–
munist state. The very fact that the bourgeois press told stories (some of
which happened to be true) throwing doubt on the perfectjustice ofthe Soviet
trials made these stories not believed by those who sympathized with Russia.
The bourgeois press which represented the interest of capitalism had every
reason to invent them. And if a fellow traveller found himself believing anti–
Soviet statements in the bourgeois press, then his doing so made him suspect
that he, as a bourgeois at heart, wished to believe them.
Solzhenitsyn summarizes in a phrase the attitude of Bukharin and the
other Russian leaders who were tried in 1937, those who above all wished to be
communists, but whom Stalin "before they became an opposition ... de–
clared them to be one, and by this move rendered them powerless." "Buk–
harin," he writes "(like all the rest of them) did not have his own
individual point
o/view",'
And all their efforts were directed towards staying in the Party. And to–
ward not harming the Party at the same time.
